Abigail Disney, the Disney heiress, and several other prominent wealthy Democratic donors have vowed to withhold donations to all Democrats until Biden steps down, later followed by Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg, with others possibly to follow. The idea was pitched to these corporate donors by none other than James Carville, who almost always sides with the corporate establishment wing of the party, going so far as to say he’d block their calls if they didn’t cut Biden off.
Plenty of Democrats are outraged, and rightly so. When donors call the shots it’s demoralizing to an average Democrat, and certainly makes it appear that the party interests lie first and foremost with big donors and not the grassroots.
However, if you were to rewind to 2016 and 2020, you’d find that the attitudes towards big donors were certainly...different, at least as far as some in the party were concerned. In 2016, Sanders was running against Wall Street greed, and Wall Street was all in for Hillary. In 2020, when it appeared that Bernie Sanders might actually win the nomination, wealthy donors also sat on the sidelines and wondered how he could be stopped, especially since at that time Biden was floundering during the early primaries. In fact, not a single S&P 500 CEO gave a dime to Bernie Sanders (or Elizabeth Warren for that matter), but gave generously to several other candidates more in line with their thinking. Some donors thought that everyone but Biden should drop out to clear the field so that Biden was the only candidate that could consolidate support to keep Bernie out. After Biden won South Carolina and gained momentum, corporate donors abandoned their plan for an anti-Bernie PAC, convinced that Biden was on the right track, and were able to turn on the money spigots for Biden, averting what they deemed would have been a disaster (the disaster according to them, was Bernie winning, not Trump winning, which several would have been okay with).
Fast forward to 2024. Those same donors so happy to help Biden in 2020 against Sanders during the primary have now turned their backs on Biden after the primaries. Why? Because they feel he can’t deliver for them anymore. Many of those corporatists and party operatives that were so happy to see the corporate cash in 2020 are distraught about funds being withheld now. Biden in fact had to hold a call for several hundred big donors to reassure them that he had things under control. Whether or not that call worked remains to be seen.
The lesson from all this should be that corporate big donors can be fickle: one day you’re loved, the next day you’re not. When all that corporate cash is behind your candidate it may feel great. But when it’s against your candidate? Not so much. Regardless, this is the unfortunate situation the party is in, enabling it in the first place.